Mission Hill

Just after posting the last entry I watched the first five episodes of 'A Year at Mission Hill', a documentary about Mission Hill school in Boston. The collaborative (and extensive) planning their staff take part in, and the sharing of food at meetings and with the school community seem like they're approaches worth pursuing.

 
A Year at Mission Hill. Chapter 5: The Eye of the Dragon. What is the relationship between points of entry into a study and engagement?

Manaakitanga - kindness, respect and humanity

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of manaakitanga recently, as it applies in the classroom, and in the wider context of staff leadership. For those of you unfamiliar with this Māori term, it's a concept that embodies the ideas of reciprocal caring for others and the environment, showing kindness and hospitality, treating people with respect and establishing nurturing relationships. The Kōrero Māori website provides an additional explanation of the concept if you're interested.

What's interested me lately is how vital the establishment of an environment that embodies manaakitanga is for authentic risk taking and learning to take place. In the case of the magazine project one of the changes I've noticed this year is that those of us (yes, I include myself) who are in their second year have a much better understanding of the need to care for and support each other's learning if we are to collaborate effectively than we did when we were fresh into the project. While the day to day experience is definitely not all rainbows and light and happiness (just like any other working environment, although this one is staffed mainly with adolescents!) there have been several times when the group has noticeably drawn together to support each other when needed. As a result of this there seems to be a stronger sense of cohesion, and more students are going to a deeper level with the research and investigations they're carrying out.

In the context of staff leadership I've been reflecting on manaakitanga as it relates to change management and raising performance. As a school (and let's face it, as educators in general, particularly those of us working in public education at the moment) there's a fair amount of pressure to raise student academic outcomes. In abstract terms this is pretty hard to argue with, and I think most individuals would agree that as educators we should be doing what we can to improve our students' achievement. 

However, in practice there seems to be quite a fine line between encouraging staff to review and reflect on their practice with an eye to improving it and leaving staff feeling overwhelmed or resistant to the changes required to see students do better. Once again manaakitanga seems vital to the process: without the experience of being respected and nurtured through the process it's much less likely that we will take the risks necessary to make meaningful and lasting changes to our practice.

I read recently that from the word go Google set themselves up to provide a version of this kind of support (although I'm not sure what the Silicon Valley term for manaakitanga is!). However, I'd be interested to hear from others of you who are working in a public school environment about how you ensure there is an abundance of manaakitanga for both your students and your staff.

Educating Entrepreneurs?

Yesterday I got into an extended discussion on Twitter with Tom Peters, Mark Bradford, Jeni Little and a few others about how teacher training needs to be modified so that it is in step with the world that our students are graduating into. The discussion was sparked by this blog post by Tom Peters, which I recommend you read.

Anyway, it's got me thinking about how as an educator one can develop an entrepreneurial spirit in young people. The reason I think this is so important is because, as far as I can tell, the world that our students are going into is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. If they are to thrive in this environment they will need to be highly adaptable, and able to make the most of any new situation they find themselves in. In this context I'm defining an 'entrepreneur' as someone who is able to use their networks and practical and intellectual abilities to make the most of a situation, rather than just someone who launches new business ventures. I'm thinking social and educational start ups, not just money making.

So, that leads me to considering the role that this project is playing (or perhaps is not playing?) in developing entrepreneurs.

There is a school of thought that says that students will learn better if they are aware of what they are learning (eg having a written learning intention on the board for each lesson). We are not explicitly teaching entrepreneurial approaches through the project, and I don't think I've ever talked with the students about what they're learning in terms of them becoming entrepreneurs. But I do hope that the attitudes they're developing in relation to learning (perseverance; seeing challenges as problems to solve, not walls; making connections with others out in 'the world') are setting them up for the lives they're going to live.

Is this enough though?

I'd love to read your thoughts.

UPT Digital

On Thursday four members of our teaching team had a Skype hui with Renea and Rachel from UPT Digital in Christchurch. UPT Digital is part of Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti, a very student focused state high school in Christchurch, NZ.

UPT Digital began four years ago as an ICT class that was looking for a more inspiring name and way of operating, and now operates with a flexible structure that allows students to spend 3 or more hours a week working on self-directed IT projects in small teams with input from local and international mentors.

It was fantastic to meet with some others who are using a similarly project based approach to us, and we were simultaneously affirmed and challenged by the approach they are taking. We covered a lot of ground in the 30 or so minutes we talked, but two of the things that stood out to me are:

• UPT Digital is tailored very well to the particular context they are working in, both in regard to the students at the school and the commercial environment (IT industry) they are working with. Their projects are student-passion driven. They collaborate with industry, and are building a direct route for students to move from the school to the workplace. This lead to some interesting discussion with our teaching team after the Skype session as we considered how this approach could be applied in the context of visual arts and music, which are in some ways quite different to the IT industry.

• Renea Mackie (the project director) takes an admirably up-front approach (I hope you don't mind me writing this Renea!) to making contact directly with industry for the benefit of her students. "We were Skyping the other day with Rod Drury about Pacific Fiber"; "We were working on an event, and school wasn't open, so we talked to Vodafone and used their offices". These industry contacts act as both mentors and collaborators, and are a central part of the UPT Digital approach. This has provided great encouragement for us to strengthen the our current contacts with people in the commercial world, and work to develop many more relationships.

If you are interested in what UPT Digital are doing, and think it might be something you'd like to bring into your own school there are already a number of 'pods' operating in New Zealand and overseas. 

Students stepping up

One of the student leadership roles we have as part of Passionfruit Magazine is the Social Media Manager. This is a key role in terms of building our audience engagement within the target group. It's interesting to note that although the role might be viewed from the outside as a chance for the student in charge to play on Facebook all day, the task of engaging an audience is actually a really complex challenge. We've had a number of discussions over the past couple of weeks about the type and frequency or posts, and have tried out various approaches.

On the weekend of 2/3 March Ezra, our Social Media Manager, hit a good balance of engaging content and frequency of sharing. It's been impressive to watch how her engagement with the role has increased, and how she's becoming increasingly savvy and analytical about how she goes about the role. This was confirmed this evening by several posts she spontaneously made in our project Facebook group sharing and commenting on data from the 'Insights' section of the project page, and relating the current Facebook audience to our magazine's overall target.

It's so rewarding to see students taking control of and responsibility for their own learning!

Teachers collaborating

As I've mentioned previously, in addition to the 'Art Project' (which produces Passionfruit Magazine), this year we're also running the 'Music Project'. This project is designed to work with students who are musically very able, but who have struggled to gain the literacy and numeracy qualifications necessary for them to move into tertiary study. This group have a couple of timetable lines allocated to music and integrated curriculum learning, as well as being in an English class on their own. Most are also in an NCEA Level 1 Photography and Design class that I teach.

Because of the dense nature of many Visual Arts texts (often written in International Art English, as it has sometimes been termed!), I put quite a bit of effort into building the students' capacity for unpacking complex written texts. As you might imagine, this has brought up a few challenges for a group of students who aren't exactly lovers of written texts, let alone complex ones!

One of the major benefits of having a group of teachers focused on working with the same students is that we've been able to tackle the same challenges from different angles. A recent case in point was the English specialist (Laura Green) being able to use some English class time working with a text unpacking exercise that I'd set the students for homework. As a result, five of the of the six students who had barely attempted their initial text unpacking assessment handed the most recent one in complete, in most cases the day after they'd been given it, despite the deadline being a week away!

This may seem a small step in some ways, but considering the academic histories of these students it's a success I'm more than willing to celebrate!

Permission to screw up

When we focus too much on doing things perfectly, we don't engage in the kind of exploratory thinking and behavior that creates new knowledge and innovation - Halvorson

Recently I came across Heidi Grant Halvorson's piece about our attitude to making mistakes and how this effects out ability to be innovative: 'Why You Should Give Yourself Permission to Screw Up'. Given that we're at the start of a major project with Passionfruit Magazine (ie beginning production of Volume 2!) and that many of the students were feeling the pressure of the first deadline (for article concepts to pitch to the editor) approaching, it seemed a good idea to sit down with the crew and pull the article apart to see what we could learn from it.

In essence, Heidi's argument is that people approach any new task with one of two mindsets: the 'Be-Good' or the 'Get-Better'. The former mindset dictates that they must be good at any task they try, and consequently can be limiting in terms of approaching unfamiliar territory. The latter mindset approaches an unfamiliar situation as a chance to learn and tends to be much more resilient in the face of unexpected challenges.

Further to this, because the 'Be-Good' mindset makes us see mistakes as something to avoid it tends to result in increased levels of anxiety when approaching a problem, which reduces our working memory and gives us less ability to think creatively and analytically.

So . . . the big lesson for our students (and their teachers, who admitted that they all deal with their fair share of 'Be-Good' tendencies!) as the project gets underway is to acknowledge that what we've taken on is challenging and won't always turn out the way we hope or expect, and to agree to do our best to communicate and seek help rather than hiding from the problems that will inevitably crop up.

I guess you'll see from later blog entries this year how this has all turned out!


99u.com is Behance's education arm. It's well worth checking out, if you're not already familiar with it.